A lot of teams think AI adoption has to begin with a major initiative. They assume it needs a strategy deck, a sweeping rollout, a big announcement, or a fully formed transformation plan before anything meaningful can happen. But in practice, that is rarely how real momentum starts. Most teams that are getting value from AI are not winning because they began bigger. They are winning because they began smaller. They found one repeated task, improved one workflow, saved one useful prompt, tightened one handoff, and turned that small gain into a repeatable system. That matters because small systems reduce time-to-value much faster than big ambitions do. ------------- Big intentions often create slow adoption ------------- When teams talk about AI in broad terms, the conversation can sound exciting but still go nowhere. People discuss possibilities, future use cases, competitive pressure, and all the ways work might change. But because the scope feels so large, no one knows exactly where to start. That is one reason big transformation language can actually slow adoption. It creates pressure without giving people a clear path. The topic becomes important enough to talk about, but too abstract to use. And when something feels abstract, it usually stays separate from daily work. This is where many teams lose time. They spend weeks discussing AI at a high level while the real opportunities are sitting in plain sight inside recurring tasks. A bloated workflow. A repeated handoff. A first draft that always starts from scratch. A review process that keeps creating the same delay. None of these problems require a grand transformation to improve. They require a usable system. AI becomes valuable when it stops being a topic and starts becoming part of how work moves. ------------- Tiny systems create faster time-to-value ------------- A tiny system is not complicated. It is simply a repeatable way of using AI to reduce friction in a task that happens often enough to matter. That could be a prompt template for weekly updates, a checklist for reviewing drafts, a workflow for turning notes into a client follow-up, or a standard structure for summarizing research.

In this video, I did something a little special, as I was out of commission for a week due to surgery. Instead of skipping the week in AI news, we put some of the best modern AI tools to the test to see what we could create. So I'm proud to present our guest host AI Igor, who will only be filling in this week while I rest my voice. AI Igor covers the results of the testing we've been doing on the top models for the past week, talks about the new Copilot Cowork coming to Microsoft 365 users, discusses the disappointing release from Luma with Uni-1, and more. Enjoy this special edition and I will be back next week!

Let me talk about something that comes up for a lot of people when they’re trying to grow… How do you know if it’s resistance…or if it’s a sign you should quit? Because when things get hard, the mind starts talking. “This isn’t for me.” “Maybe I picked the wrong path.” “This shouldn’t feel this hard.” “Maybe I’m forcing it.” What I’ve learned after decades of building businesses, taking risks, and watching people succeed or quit is that resistance shows up when you’re about to do something that matters. Not when you stay comfortable. Not when you play small. Not when you go through the motions. Resistance shows up when you try to grow. It looks like procrastination. Overthinking. Doubt. Fear. Starting and stopping. Talking yourself out of the very thing you once said you wanted. And the crazy part? The more your life is about to expand…the louder resistance gets. So before you decide to quit, ask yourself: Is this really wrong for me…or is this just the part where growth gets uncomfortable? Because most people don’t fail because they chose the wrong path. They fail because they listened to resistance at the exact moment they were supposed to push through. Stay in the fight. Your next level might be closer than you think.